1. Challah.  My wife got a cookbook for Christmas with a Challah bread recipe in it, and it is awesome.  The finished bread looks like a work of art, and tastes like angels dancing on a wheat field.

2.  Cable.  I know, this sounds really, really shallow and materialistic, but hear me out.  We canceled our cable about a year ago, because: we just weren’t watching much TV; and we were more interested in saving the cash than watching the one-point-five shows in all of televisiondom that didn’t strike me as being written and acted by chain-smoking lemurs suffering turpentine withdrawal.  Recently, though, we’ve made some shifts in our living arrangements (more on that in a minute), which has given us incentive to reinstall the cable and once again have vacuous entertainment sluice into our home through the Great Coaxial Snake.

There is one thing I’m truly excited about, though.

Ants.

Back when we still had cable, I stumbled across Discovery HD Theatre.  It’s not the Discovery Channel, per se, but it has some interesting shows on it from time to time and, as a bonus, it’s in high-def.  Whilst watching this channel one Saturday morning, I stumbled into a show about ants.  A bunch of scientists spent an hour more or less attempting to prove a thesis which was, as near as I can figure, “ants are awesome.”

This was boot camp for ants.  These things were hanging off upside-down panes of glass with little weights strapped to their backs, and grimly clutching the rims of rapidly spinning centrifuges, and all kinds of ridiculous but thoroughly captivating stuff.

So, perhaps it’s not so much the cable that I’m jazzed about.  Perhaps it’s the ants.  Still, watching hockey in high def and surround sound has its merits, too.

3. Friends.  Yes, from one extreme to the other.  Having just sung the praises of consumer cable, I am now taking a page from the pre-kindergarten prayer book and being thankful for friends.  As I hinted at above, though, we’re planning a shift in our living arrangements, in which one of our friends is moving in with us.  There’s a whole lotta house here that we’re not using, and it makes good sense on all fronts to capitalize on that.

I’m looking forward to this, not least because this person recognizes the value of both video games and motorcycles.

photo credit: JackVinson